Director – Adam Gierasch, Screenplay – Jace Anderson & Adam Gierasch, Producer – Limor Diamant, Photography – Yaron Levy, Music – Joseph Conlan, Special Effects Supervisor – Ken Gorell, Production Design – Hannah Beachler. Production Company – After Dark Films/Signature Pictures.
Leisha Hailey (Emily Weaver), Gale Harold (Nate Weaver/William Weaver), Jonell Kennedy (Brittany), Chelcie Ross (Avery Hutchins), Stephanie Brown (Risa), Rod McCullough (Sheriff Crane)
Emily Weaver suffers a miscarriage. She and her husband Nate decide to get away from the city and take over the old family farmhouse. During renovations, workmen clearing out the drains discover a human skull. Emily learns of the house’s history – how May, the wife of its builder William Weaver, disappeared and that there have been bizarre murders at the house ever since. Emily also discovers that she is pregnant again. She then starts to see spooky figures around the house, while Nate stays in the shed and becomes brooding as he obsesses about his artwork.
Adam Gierasch is a director of medium-budgeted horror films. Gierasch had started out writing screenplays for genre works that include Spiders (2000), Rats (2003), Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007) and several Tobe Hooper films, Crocodile (2000), Toolbox Murders (2003) and Mortuary (2005). Gierasch made his directorial debut with the hospital horror Autopsy (2008), followed by the remake of Night of the Demons (2009) and subsequent to this Fractured (2013) and House By the Lake (2017), as well as the Trick episode of Tales of Halloween (2015). Gierasch co-writes all his work with his wife Jace Anderson.
Fertile Ground was Adam Gierasch’s third film as director. After the gore-drenched horrors of Autopsy and the effects-driven Night of the Demons, Fertile Ground was a change of direction into the Haunted House genre for Gierasch and Anderson. I approached this with a certain caution – the haunted house genre has suffered from massive oversaturation by low-budget entries during the 2000s/2010s to the point that I dread having to watch yet another film that rehashes the same overused tropes.
Not too surprisingly, Fertile Ground quickly falls into a host of the familiar tropes of the genre – the young couple moving into the inherited house; the discovery of the house’s dark and troubling history; the wife seeing spooky things and her sanity being doubted by her husband; the husband descending into brooding as he occupies himself with his artwork in the shed a la The Amityville Horror (1979). What is notable is some of the tropes that are not present – for one, the lack of grieved soul(s) from the past who are crying out for closure in the present.
However, what exactly is going on gets a little murky. The script hints at things like Gale Harold’s agent being mysteriously killed, while the house seems to cause the husband to become possibly possessed. All before Fertile Ground reaches an ending that seems to indicate that much of this was in Leisha Hailey’s head.
For all his marshalling of the tropes, it is not often that Adam Gierasch ever lets it play off into anything spooky. I did like one scene where Leisha Hailey is talking to husband Gale Harold via the intercom where he apologises for his earlier outburst but then abruptly calls her Mary, the missing ancestor, before the real Gale walks in and immediately begins to angrily demand to know who she is talking to.
Trailer here